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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of hugely lucrative concerts – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”